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| Pietro da Cortona Chariot of Venus 1622 tempera on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Pietro da Cortona Portrait of Pope Urban VIII Barberini ca. 1624-26 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
"The new painter, Pietro Berrettini from Cortona, was also a Tuscan and he was brought to the attention of Urban VIII by one of the Pope's closest friends, Marcello Sacchetti. The two brothers Marcello and Giulio, who came to play crucial roles in the political and artistic world of Urban VIII, were the sons of an extremely rich Florentine businessman who had moved to Rome towards the end of the sixteenth century and had soon become one of the leaders of the Tuscan community there . . . Giulio was made a cardinal in 1626 and thereafter enjoyed a highly successful career in the Church; Marcello became papal treasurer and was given the monopoly of the alum mines at Tolfa which he at once had painted by Pietro [below]."
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| Pietro da Cortona Landscape with Alum Mines at Tolfa ca. 1630-40 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Pietro da Cortona Madonna and Child with St Catherine and St John the Baptist ca. 1610 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Pietro da Cortona Madonna and Child with Cherubs 1625 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
"Marcello [Sacchetti] had decided views on painting and his encouragement of Pietro to copy Raphael and Titian marks a focal point in the history of seventeenth-century art: that combination of Raphael's freest, most imaginative design with Titian's warmth of color was the foundation stone on which Baroque painting was established. Thereafter every artist was required to undergo similar training. Pietro was a docile artist who even in his later days of great fame would always ask his patrons for subjects, and here too Marcello's influence was vital. He was a learned man, steeped in classical culture, and a poet, a new type of patron to whom the eager young Pietro was especially welcome. For Pietro could give warm and vivid life to his dreams of the past, could re-create for him all the trappings of antiquity and yet avoid the coldness of a 'classical' artist such as Domenichino. Annibale Carracci had had the same gift, but not since his death had a painter been as fresh, and yet as grand and as serious, in his evocation of the fables of ancient Rome and Greece as was Pietro da Cortona at the stage of his life when he painted for Sacchetti large canvases of The Sacrifice of Polyxena, The Triumph of Bacchus and shortly afterwards The Rape of the Sabines. In these he moved from dark, and even crude, beginnings to a rich, warm, sun-soaked world of stately, processional figures which were soon adopted by other artists in the Sacchetti orbit."
– from Patrons and Painters by Francis Haskell (Yale University Press, 1980)
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| Pietro da Cortona Rape of the Sabines 1630-31 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Guido Reni Polyphemus 1639-40 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
THE CYCLOPS TO GALATEA
My soul, my life itself should burn for thee,
And this one eye, as dear as life to me.
Why was I not with fins, like fishes, made,
That I, like them might in the deep have play'd?
Then would I dive beneath the yielding tide,
And kiss your hand, if you your lips deny'd.
To thee I'd lilies and red poppies bear,
And flowers that crown each season of the year.
But I'm resolv'd I'll learn to swim and dive
Of the next stranger that does here arrive,
That th' undiscover'd pleasures I may know
Which you enjoy in the deep flood below.
Come forth, O nymph! and coming forth forget,
Like me that on this rock unmindful sit
(Of all things else unmindful but of thee),
Home to return forget, and live with me.
– translation by Richard Duke (1658-1711) from an Idyll of Theocritus
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| Guido Reni St Sebastian 1615 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Guido Reni Young Woman with a Diadem ca. 1640-42 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Cavaliere d'Arpino Diane the Huntress ca. 1601-03 oil on panel Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Peter Paul Rubens Romulus and Remus 1615-16 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Anthony van Dyck Portrait of engravers Pieter de Jode the Elder and Pieter de Jode the Younger 1620s oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Sisto Badalocchio Madonna and Child ca. 1603-05 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Caravaggio St John the Baptist with Ram 1602 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
"Saint John the Baptist was not only the most frequently depicted saint in private devotional paintings, but over the course of the sixteenth century images of the youthful Baptist in the desert also had become invested with the most varied range of attributes, not one of which was obligatory. Those chosen by Caravaggio for his painting, while perhaps not the most typical, were perfectly common in the art of Lombardy and the Veneto. There were no hard-and-fast rules to say that the traditional lamb, the Agnus Dei, could not also be a ram. Nor is the androgynous nudity an altogether new departure; as Friedlaender pointed out more than fifty years ago, Leonardo had already depicted the saint in that way. Closer to home, Annibale Carracci had just painted a nude Saint John in Rome. The painting, which has come down to us as an engraving only, draws on Michelangelo's famous Ignudi on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, one of which had already been transformed into a Saint John in an engraving by Battista Franco. So when Caravaggio makes even more explicit reference to Michelangelo's youths, he neither picks an inappropriate model nor does he satirize it, as has occasionally been suggested. The raised right arm points to a deliberate competition with Annibale Carracci, with whom Caravaggio had just seen himself juxtaposed in the Cerasi Chapel. The position of the arm also links the figure to his patrons, the Mattei, in front of whose palazzo stands the so-called Fontana delle Tartarughe ('Turtle Fountain') featuring four naked bronze youths in exactly the same pose. Thus Caravaggio also enters into competition with sculpture, reviving a theoretical discussion of which Ciriaco Mattei would have been aware. The verbascum plant in the foreground alludes to the Baptist, who was liked to a blazing torch because of his unconditional love for Christ. This love makes him smilingly embrace the ram, symbol of Christ's sacrificial death, a joyous allusion to the decisive moment of the redemption of humanity through the death of the Savior. This cheerfulness was also an integral part of Oratorian spirituality, which the Mattei supported. The Mattei, who bequeathed the painting to Cardinal Del Monte in 1624, always treated it as a devotional painting rather than a cabinet picture; its religious character is therefore beyond doubt."
– from Caravaggio: The Artist and His Work by Sybille Ebert-Schifferer (Getty Museum, 2012)
In her introduction, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer explains why she decided to give the world another book on Caravaggio – when more than 4,000 books on Caravaggio already exist. Picasso, in fact, is the only other painter who has attracted as much bad writing in the modern era as Caravaggio. For good writing about Picasso, there is T.J. Clark. For an up-to-date, factual account of Caravaggio and his impact, Ebert-Schifferer is the most useful place to start, the best-grounded and least fanciful.